What the painting symbolized had never been just sorrow. It represented grief and despair after losing everything.
The girl's last act broke the boundary between art and reality in the worst possible way, breaking the first rule.
The moment her hand slipped from the canvas, the storm inside Despair of the Deep surged and became reality. The room exploded into pressure, rain and salty water. The mermaid's scream did not stay in the painting. The entire kingdom heard it.
The assassins were the first to pay for it.
Her white violin rose in her hands and when the first note came out, they froze. The note was thin and beautiful. It slid under the skin of every man in that chamber and made their bodies react before their minds did. Their ears rang. Their teeth clenched. Their knees weakened. The assassins reached for weapons that suddenly felt absurd in the presence of something that did not care about them.
Water rose everywhere at once. The mansion groaned as if the building had suddenly remembered it was standing above a sea. Water climbed the ankles of the assassins and reached their waists. They shouted and stumbled back but the water had already become deeper than it should have been. One of them slashed at the air as if the water were a body he could cut open. Another tried to haul himself toward the door and found that the hall beyond was already filling too. The sorrowful mermaid sat in the painting's frame and played again.
The rising waters listened to her.
Outside the mansion, the kingdom began to feel it in fragments. At first it was only the sound. A low, unbearable vibration came through the streets. The people in the outer districts looked around in confusion as their lamps flickered blue. Horses reared in their harnesses. Steam boilers hissed and vented without command.
The rain started.
It came down in sheets so heavy that windows cracked under the pressure. It struck roofs with the force of thrown gravel. It flooded gutters in seconds and forced itself into the machinery, gears and furnaces of the city.
The assassins in the mansion were only the beginning.
The mermaid's despair did not stay in that mansion. It moved outward through the bond the painting had already forged. Every person who had betrayed that house suddenly found themselves standing in a world where water was deciding who deserved to keep breathing. The first wave hit the mansion walls and shattered the lower windows outward. A second surge burst through the corridors and swallowed the staircases.
Men who had once believed themselves invisible were slammed against pillars, dragged under by currents that came from nowhere and pinned to the floor by the sheer weight of the deep. Some tried to crawl. Some screamed. Some managed only a single desperate breath before the water filled their mouths and drowned them.
The mermaid did not stop playing.
With every note, the sea outside the mansion expanded. Canals overflowed first, then streets and then whole districts. The Kingdom of Steam had been built with pipes, pressure systems, reservoirs, drainage channels and vast metal foundations meant to control the city's breath. That control failed in moments.
Steam vents burst in clouds hot enough to scald and then vanished under rising floodwater. Brass bridges groaned and dipped beneath black water. Clock towers reflected lightning in broken shards as the flood climbed their stone bases. The city tried to fight the ocean with machinery and lost almost instantly. Every pump that activated seemed only to feed the violence. Every valve that opened let the water deeper into the bones of the kingdom.
The servants who had betrayed the family were hunted first by guilt, then by the sea.
One ran down a corridor and found the floor slick beneath him. He looked back and saw the mermaid's shadow moving in the flood behind the walls. Another dropped to his knees and begged, not to the girl, who was already dying, but to whatever mercy remained in the world. Mercy did not answer. The water rose over his face and dragged him with such force that his body struck the wall once before disappearing under the dark surface.
In the royal district, the same thing began happening to the officers and courtiers who had ordered the assassination. They were at first too far away to understand, then too close to escape and then too late to resist. Water broke through courtyards. It poured through palace halls. It shattered the floors and climbed the steps of the throne chambers.
The mermaid kept playing.
The sailors came next, though they were already dead in the old sense. The painting had always shown sailors falling into the depths because they were the people who thought they understood the sea best. That was the joke the origin had been making all along. They had believed they belonged to the water because they knew how to cross it. Now that the painting's despair had broken loose, The sailors of that painting pulled the people under. Men who had been on rooftops suddenly found themselves staring down into flooding alleys where fish and dark currents moved like knives.
The creatures from the painting appeared too.
They rose through the floodwaters in schools. They moved through the lower districts, dragging victims beneath the surface and leaving nothing but red turbulence and broken screams. Men who had climbed onto streetlamps to avoid drowning found the water reaching them anyway. The creatures circled beneath them and then pulled them down with violence.
Those who tried to flee in carriages found the roads already splitting under flood pressure. Horses panicked. Wheels jammed. Metal axles snapped. Water swallowed the undercarriages and lifted the vehicles like toys before smashing them into walls or dragging them into canals that no longer knew their own boundaries.
The entire kingdom was beginning to sound like a machine being strangled.
Steam hissed from ruptured pipes. Bells rang from submerged towers. Chains snapped somewhere in the harbor. Factory whistles blew endlessly as workers fled from platforms only to find the streets outside already underwater.
The mermaid's music was everywhere now. It came through doors. It came through ceilings. It came through the bones of the house. Those who heard it longest were the easiest to drown. The girl's body lay near the frame while all of this unfolded. She could no longer move.
At the five-minute mark, the outer districts were gone. At the eight-minute mark, the harbor was a graveyard of masts, chimneys and half-submerged warehouses. At ten minutes, the palace district had become an island of collapsing rooftops and breaking windows. At twelve minutes, the royal family's residence was no longer a residence but a flooded shell full of screaming and falling masonry.
At fifteen minutes, there was nothing left that deserved the name of civilization. There was just rubble, scrap metal, broken glass, warped gears, drowned streets and a long black sea where a kingdom had once stood.
The assassins died knowing they had failed.
They did not get to report success to the royal family that had ordered the killing. They were erased inside the flood they had helped create. Some vanished under water. Some were crushed beneath ironwork. Some were torn apart by the pressure of the currents and the violence of the creatures in the deep.
There were no survivors.
The mermaid saw it all and still she played.
By the end, her despair had become the shape of the kingdom's end. Her violin was the last music they heard above the water as the Kingdom of Steam sank into ruin. The storms did not stop until there was nothing left worth drowning. The sea was everywhere and where it withdrew, it left only ruin behind.
What had once been a civilization of brass, smoke, invention and imperial confidence was now just an underwater ruin.
In the center of all that destruction, the mermaid finally stopped playing.
------
The mermaid did not notice the woman at first because the sea was still shaking with the last echoes of her own grief. When the mermaid lifted her head, she saw a woman standing on the surface of the water as if it were solid ground.
One hand was holding a black umbrella over her head. She wore a simple white dress that did not belong to the wreckage around her. Her face remained hidden beneath the umbrella's shadow but the mermaid did not need to see it to know who had come.
The mermaid's grip tightened around the girl's body. The girl still wore that small, peaceful smile. The mermaid had knelt beside her on a massive rock after the kingdom drowned, unable to do anything except hold her and keep her close. The water had already taken everything else. The one thing it had not taken was the girl's expression. The mermaid looked up at the woman with a fury so tired it had become grief's final shape.
"Are you here to erase me?"
The Painter of Origins said nothing at first.
She lowered her free hand as if giving her an offer. The mermaid stared at it and then back down at the girl in her arms. Her face twisted with the desperate understanding that had been waiting inside her since the moment the girl died. She knew what this woman could do. She knew what it meant to be remade. She knew that the moment an origin-authority appeared, she might be stripped of this body, this memory and this final connection. She drew a breath that trembled like the last note of her violin and spoke with honesty.
"I want to die alongside her. Do not make me into something else. Do not turn me into a new painting. I will never find anyone who loved me as much as she did."
The Painter remained silent long enough that the sea itself seemed to hesitate. Then, slowly, she nodded. The mermaid closed her eyes for the briefest instant before a spike shot through her chest. It came so fast that she barely had time to gasp. Her hands loosened around the girl as the pain spread through her. The violin slipped from her lap and vanished into the water.
She fell beside the girl on the rock.
The two of them lay there together in the middle of the artificial ocean. The girl's face still held that small, relieved smile. The mermaid turned her head just enough to see it, and with the last of her strength she whispered.
"Thank you for giving me a wonderful time, Marguerite."
The mermaid died.
For a moment, nothing moved.
The sea remained as it was. The great storm above the kingdom still churned. The rock in the middle of the water held the two companions like a memorial no one had asked for and no one would ever forget. The Painter of Origins stood before them in silence, umbrella still in hand and gave a long, tired sigh. She lifted her head and summoned a paintbrush.
It was the size of a mage's staff and yet strangely elegant. Its bristles were dark and dense as if they had been made to absorb reality itself. She moved it once through the air.
All at once, the sea began to drain towards the brush in long spiralling currents. The black ocean that had swallowed the kingdom rose in streams and ribbons toward the bristles. The motion accelerated, absorbing the entire body of water. Streets reappeared beneath the surface. Broken bridges emerged. Dead machinery, shattered rooftops, collapsed stone and twisted steel towers came back into view as the water vanished into the brush in endless sheets. In less than a minute, the artificial flood was gone.
Only the ruins remained. It was a vast field of devastation where the Kingdom of Steam had once lived and breathed. The capital was unrecognizable. The villages outside it were flattened, drowned or burned out by pressure failures and secondary flooding. She looked over the wreckage and sighed again.
"Seven hundred thousand dead from the capital to the villages. A useful yield. Fortunately, those souls will serve well in maintaining the Obsidian Runic Spire. I should use the remaining ones to—"
Her wrist began to beep.
The Painter of Origins exhaled through her nose with obvious annoyance and lowered the brush. Then she folded the umbrella. The motion revealed her face at last.
She had white dragon horns that curved from her head, dark bronze skin and golden eyes that seemed more ancient than the ruins behind her. Her hair was dark but the tips were streaked with white, as if some part of her had been dipped in moonlight and never fully returned. The watch on her wrist beeped again and she glanced at it.
"It is time for the fifty-year duration meeting. At least this time I'll deliver the souls on time."
She glanced once more over the broken kingdom, as if measuring the efficiency of the damage.
"Who knew selling a painting to a city would make me such a reliable collector of souls? A shame I can't use that method again. Other places will become cautious after this. Still... not a bad idea."
She raised one hand and adjusted the fold of her dress. Purple light gathered beneath her feet. A Teleportation Rune opened in front of her. Before stepping through, she cast one last glance at the rock, the girl, and the mermaid and then vanished.
And with that, Valeria Cassie Richinaria disappeared into the rune's light.